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You can always print-to-file and then upload your file to Google Drive. So what's special about this feature?

It's a service that allows you to connect your printer through the Internet (with Chrome having a built-in client, not sure if you can do the same using other browsers by visiting the service website). That way GNOME may allow users to print things using remote printers connected through Google Cloud Print. I recently discovered that you can install a client called "Google Cloud Printer" on Windows, which tells Windows to treat Cloud Print as a printing device, but that client is not available on Linux. Now we can use it from Linux through GNOME. Basically when you want to print something, e.g. an ODT file in LibreOffice, you can just follow the usual procedure and press Ctrl+P, the print dialog will appear and you can select printers connected through Cloud Print, that's for Windows(I haven't personally tried it though) but I'm not sure if it's the same for GNOME.

The "print to file.... Google Drive" the article mentioned is just the common "print to file" function provided by many other platforms(Windows even provides "print to OneNote") that doesn't send your printing information to a printer but instead stores it as a file(which might be useful if you don't actually have the file, e.g. if you want to save a webpage as a static document, but personally I have never needed to use this function), except the file is saved to your Google Drive instead of local storage. Btw there is also a "Print to phone" function that does the same but sends the file to your Android device(if logged into Google). Note that "print to file/phone" produces pdf files.